Camdat [none/use name]

For example in my podunk town we got something called a “makerspace”. On the surface level it seems harmless enough but I can’t help but not like it, perhaps of what it represents?

A place that allows people to share expensive resources for their collective good? An environment for people to learn without investing hundreds into equipment? How is that a bad thing lol

Whatsapp is sending your audio to the cloud to handle transcription. This is not an accurate test because it is not an on-device process.

The Internet and smartphones are not mystical devices. This is something you can independently confirm yourself very easily.

I have the knowledge necessary to say this 100% does not occur on devices that I own.

You can filter by device. Leave your suspect device connected to your network for a few days, filter by destination and review. Also keep an eye on CPU usage.

If your devices have a ton of random outgoing network requests you’re already being tracked in a myriad of other ways and need to lock your shit down.

I’ve done this before, there’s not as much network bloat as you might think.

Sure this is definitely true. I should clarify that single-word NNs do run on-device all the time, but those require specialized models that are trained only on those keywords. Once those models trigger they need to send everything else to the cloud.

Feel free to Wireshark your smart devices and confirm what I’ve said yourself. The most efficient way to do this is the pixels that already exist on almost every site.

On-device NNs use insane amounts of processing, even on “high-end” phones. You would notice if there was a always-on NN running on your device, this is also something you can try for yourself.

I think people greatly underestimate (or misunderstand) the pervasiveness of ad tracking pixels.

Basically any website that has ads or tries to sell you something has a tracking pixel. These pixels create profiles of devices and track almost everything you do while interacting with those sites.

These pixels don’t require any actual “information” about you, they’re only interested in what you (via the device you’re browsing on) will buy. They also don’t use cookies anymore, it’s usually a combination of user agent, IP address, and coarse location. As you said, companies will generally share these profiles.

This is maybe my biggest pet peeve. These companies are not listening to you in any meaningful way.

You can trivially confirm this by hooking up your home network to Wireshark and filtering packets.

Other reasons:

1. They can get all of this information elsewhere: searches, ad pixels, location capturing etc.
2. Processing audio data is basically impossible on-device in a useful way, and the network infrastructure to support mass transcriptions on the cloud would be on the order of billions.
3. It would be a massive endeavor to cover up the millions of hours of audio data that would need to be analyzed by the lowest paid and most unhappy workers in the industry (content labelers and moderators)

Now I’m sure this is some marketers wet dream, but the logistical and PR nightmare this would create dissuades all but the dumbest ad agencies. This is mostly just terrible tech journalism.